Live and let die...

[Rey]

Such a sad day to return to this site and read this thread. Thank you Arjan for all your effort and your enthusiasm. I wish I had at least half of it, and some of the stuff I had meant to write would have been up here for all to enjoy. Alas, my blood is but a tainted one and could never measure up.
I hope one day you will return and WotC will come to some senses.

'Guardians of the halls of heart
When we from my homeland depart
To challenge the gods of emptiness
May the quest begin!'

[Fizz]

I understand your frustration Arjan. You've done great work here, and the community will always be grateful. I am sure WotC's idiocy will not detract from the passion that you have for the setting.

D&D Next probably won't be out until '14. As you know, Rich Baker had said he'd love to go back to Birthright again. Maybe with a voice like his and a strong petition, we could talk some sense into WotC someday.

But in the meanwhile, you will be missed Arjan. Don't be a stranger.


-Fizz

[Thatoneguy]

It is sad when yet another gamer even loses a small piece of their Zest for gaming. I have seen many players stop coming to the table over the years, and it is always a sad event.

[bigmac]

Cheers all!

trust me i really have tried.. i got an endless email conversation with their lawyer and several brand managers trying to make my point and trying to let them see the value and even benefits for sustaining contact in combi with D&D next..

but they simply turned me down.. multiple times.

This really hurts my heart and feelings especially after what we have accomplished as a community after 12 years that i have to make a decision like this.. its like saying your last goodbye to your 12 year old kid....

Hi Arjan,

I just found out about this at the Birthright forum at The Piazza.

You probably don't remember me. I'm primarily a Spelljammer fan, and spend less time talking to people about Birthright than SJ. You helped me out a while back, when someone came to The Piazza and said they were having trouble logging on here.

I'm really sorry that WotC's actions have hurt your feelings.

These lawyers don't really care about D&D. They are paid to protect WotC's IP - not to help other people look after dormant IP.

And the other people you are talking about believe that they need to concentrate on a single campaign setting. They think they need to only have Forgotten Realms in order to make D&D Next work better than 4th Edition. They are not bad people, but this is the party line that WotC announced and they are going to have to stick with it for the next few years.

I think these people are wrong. I think the Edition Treadmill is a mistake - a terrible mistake. I think that D&D's "wealth" is in its different campaign settings. They give people a choice of different worlds to play in, with each world having its own combination of "cool stuff". Switching from Greyhawk to Birthright or from Birthright to Ravenloft allows a gaming group to explore a new land, with different themes and different challanges. Switching from one system to another system, just makes people learn a lot of mathematics. Playing with two or more settings adds to the challange of roleplaying. It's fun. Playing with two or more sets of rules is more like taking mathematics exams. It's boring. Every time they reboot the rules, more people jump ship and stay with the deprecated ruleset.

And from my point of view, as someone that likes D&D to have multiple campaign settings, the edition treadmill makes it harder for fan communities to keep up with the current rules. And if the community can't keep up, the player base wants to stick with the old rules.

I think you guys have done an amazing job with the BRCS stuff. You have done more than some of the other setting communities. But I think that putting all your hopes and dreams on staying with D&D Next is a mistake. I'm not saying that you should avoid D&D Next (D&D Next + Birthright could be fun). But if you are putting all your hopes and dreams on trying to negotiate a D&D Next Birthright deal, I think you are talking to the wrong people.

There are other people out there, outside of these forums, that respect what you guys do. You should be talking to them instead. More importantly, there are people that do not know Birthright very well. I think you should be talking to them too. And there are even people who never heard of Birthright, but who might think it is a really cool setting.

You have some brilliant freebies over here. There are D&D fans elsewhere that have never seen them. There are people out there that don't realise that they are destined to be new Birthright fans. These are people that your time would be better spent on. These are people that could pass links onto friends elsewhere and spread the word.

Not all of the D&D fans outside of the Birthright.net forums will jump into the community or start up a Birthright campaign, but some will. I spent about two years hunting for Spelljammer fans on Facebook and managed to find a lot of people that didn't realise that anyone else still cared. So I know that, if you go looking for lost Birthright fans (or new Birthright fans) you will find them.

Like I said, I'm sorry that WotC's actions hurt your feelings. But I think that turning your back on the Birthright community is the wrong reaction. A bunch of outsiders that don't get the importance of Birthright are the cause of your pain. Birthright fans have not rejected you. Maybe you don't want to continue to do administration work forever. Maybe you want a holiday. Maybe you need reinforcements in your forum team or something. But I don't see how turning your back on Birthright is the right answer to a bunch of suits not getting how cool the setting is.

I do hope you will reconsider. I would like to see fans of the 2nd Edition TSR settings working together to help raise awareness of the fact that there are worlds out there other than Forgotten Realms. And I would like to see websites like Birthright.net teaming up with the other leading D&D setting sites (official or not) to help make sure every fan of every out of print setting can find their fan community.

You say live and let die - I say live and let live. Or to hijack a phrase from the boss of Dragonlance Nexus: Long live Birthright!

i am afraid petitions would not help.. as it has never helped in the past.

Actually, there is an area where a petition might help Birthright. In case you missed the news that went along with the D&D Next announcement, WotC said they were bringing back the out of print downloads in some form. That form has recently been revealed as the D&D Classics website (run by DriveThru RPG).

DriveThru RPG have only put up a fraction of the new improved scans from WotC's collection of WotC and TSR products. (Even that nearly knocked them offline.) At some point very very soon, the Birthright product range will go back on sale...

...but it will be PDF only...

...and if you know anything about DriveThru RPG, you will know that they started doing Print on Demand (PoD) in the last few years.

So there is a company that can do PoD that is not doing PoD. All it takes is one small change and we could have the original Birthright products back in print again! I think it is worth pushing for that. That is something that could help the Birthright fanbase.

[Vicente]

Well Arjan, I'm really thankful for the amazing job you have done for so many years for this community. It is really appreciated, and impressive that you have done it for so long.

So a toast to you, best webmaster we could have hoped for this amazing setting

[DarkApple]

I do hope this is only an "au revoir" not an "adieu"!

[Mirviriam]

Cheers all!

trust me i really have tried.. i got an endless email conversation with their lawyer and several brand managers trying to make my point and trying to let them see the value and even benefits for sustaining contact in combi with D&D next..

but they simply turned me down.. multiple times.

This really hurts my heart and feelings especially after what we have accomplished as a community after 12 years that i have to make a decision like this.. its like saying your last goodbye to your 12 year old kid....

i am afraid petitions would not help.. as it has never helped in the past.

I've personally met 5 of the people they send out on tours to the cons via my involvement with Convergence in Minneapolis. This doesn't surprise me one bit. They live in their own world, which dictates they are the greatest game designers in the history of mankind & they carry the hopes and dreams of everyone (never mind pokey mon out did them & still makes more money for M.B.).

The part that gets me, was that their people on tour answered every question at all 5 panels with "'Next', Will Fix It" ... regardless of if they were talking the customization of of individuals or the mechanics of encounters, magic item distribution, or the encounters per hour philosophy.

The last point that struck me, was that even though they clearly failed as a company - they still believe their niche of table top games prevents them from acknowledging trending or even that their game falls into the entertainment industry.

At the convention that is ran for all geeks (it is not a gaming convention), we still are scheduling them as a panel, but we were asked why we cut their room comps down to 2. Normally, we don't ask them to share - but with this year being the British Invasion, we'd rather have 9 ex-doctor who cast members than any extra people from that failing enterprise. I will say the guys from Paizo are pretty cool & the White Elephant in the room was that even the D&D people new Paizo was keeping D&D alive the past 15 years. The only decent person I met from the straight D&D people was the local fan boy who carried 3 of the 5 panels.

No surprise that the morons who brought us 4th Edition would come up thinking hundreds of people working for years would just be wasting their time instead of an incredibly valuable test market & research tool. I had held out hope in light of the Paizo thing the past 3 years for D&D ... I think it must rankle something fierce over at DND that they had to rely on Paizo for so long.

Wish you guys all well

[Rudzielec]

Hello.
This is my first post here, and I`d like to thank Arjan and all the fantastic people that made this place what it is now. I knew there was such thing as Birthright, like you know that there is such thing as Australia. You more or less know where it is, you know a few facts about it and thats it. But when you actually manage to get to Australia you see a whole new continent full of wonders. It was like this for me, I only recently stumbled on this site by an accident, and then i just couldnt speak with disbelief. Even now im lacking proper words to describe what wonderfull job you all did here. Let me just say this : Bigmac is right, there are people out there,that are destined to play Birthright. I consider myself one of them, I just finished the handbook you created and try to get a grasp on all the rules but I did fell in love with Birthright. So when I saw that post you wrote Arjan that you step down I just wanted to let you know that im grateful for what you and other people did here. I only hope you wont let some people that dont know what you did and how hard it was, to make you loose your fire. Id like you to know that there is a lot of people, myself included, that are happier because of what you did, and you should be proud of what you achieved. What you did here is so fantastic because you all did this by yourself, not wotc, but a community of enthusiastic people who just like this setting. So once again I wanted to thank you and everyone for creating this place I`ll try to contribute as much as I can as long as you can stand me.